Sci Fi Writers Have / No Sense of Energy

Sci-fi writers do not know what "energy" is.

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Anime and Manga

• Digimon has so many examples that one has to wonder how the Digital World hasn't collapsed upon itself yet. Surprisingly many monsters have profiles that detail them attacking their opponents with ludicrously hot fire, absolute zero-temperature ice, missiles and other projectiles with the destructive power of nuclear warheads, the list goes on. At least these largely appear to be Informed Attributes in the anime, video games and other sources... or the writers really have no idea what they are talking about. At these preposterously high outputs, the Mons could singlehandedly eradicate the planet they're in.
• In a heat-related example, when Bleach's Yamamoto revealed his bankai, the temperature for one of the techniques is stated to exceed 15,000,000°C. For reference, this is the estimated temperature for the sun's core.
• In A Certain Magical Index, Accelerator at one point uses his powers to throw a building across the city. That's impressive enough on its own, but the novel mentions where he got the energy to do that: he siphoned it off of the Earth's rotational force, using enough of it that Earth's day was lengthened by five minutes. One fan did the math on that and came up with so much kinetic energy that it would theoretically be enough to shatter the planet several times over. We all know Accelerator is ridiculously powerful, but one wonders if the author meant to make him that powerful.
• In Cat Planet Cuties, when the Catian mothership is sabotaged, it's sent on a collision course with Earth. The Catians tell the main characters that an impact will be of the "wipe out humanity" level, though the ship has special failsafes that will cause it to self-destruct before it can enter the atmosphere in order to prevent such a catastrophe. Later, a news report says that the ship is uncontrollably heading towards Earth and could cause an impact of "multiple kilotons" if it hits, which would put it at the range of a small tactical nuclear weapon, which is orders of magnitude smaller.

Comic Books

• Superman's power is said to come entirely from solar energy. He can use this power to — among other things — move faster than the speed of light, a feat which requires infinite amounts of energy. His strength, heat vision, heck, even simply flying, take far more energy than simple solar collection, no matter how efficient, would provide.
• The Flash, even at relatively slow speeds, would use way more energy than a human body could ever safely contain, other than his body's mass being directly converted into energy. The Speed Force, introduced during Mark Waid's run, is basically an entire universe of energy that is accessed by speedsters to power their speed.
• In V4 Legion of Super-Heroes, the moon is blown up. Earth hardly notices, even though just a few chunks of it should wreak disaster on the Earth equivalent to being hit by hundreds of asteroids at once. Later on, the Earth is blown up and said to damage the moons of Saturn, when the effect should be unnoticeable.

Films — Live-Action

• In Warrior of the Lost World a big truck known as "Mega Weapon" is said to require "40 megatons" to destroy. This is more than TWO THOUSAND times the yield of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, and only slightly less than the yield of the most powerful nuke ever detonated (the Soviets' ludicrously powerful 50MT "Tsar Bomba").
• Energy, where it comes from and where it goes to, is almost never discussed in Star Wars.
  • In Return of the Jedi, the second Death Star, in a low orbit above the moon of Endor, is destroyed by having rockets fired at its main reactor. This releases enough energy to completely vaporize the entire station, either dozens or hundreds of miles in diameter (the exact width of the Death Star varies from source to source, and arguably shot to shot) and then - nothing. The energy released simply produces a cloud of plasma, which quickly dissipates. No other electromagnetic energy of any kind was seemingly emitted or traveled much beyond the boundaries of the plasma cloud. Endor itself suffered no ill effects of any kind from this massive explosion in low orbit—which was lampshaded in a Legends-era comic book.
  • The Force Awakens takes previous lapses in scale to a new level with Starkiller Base. The entire concept of Starkiller Base is so ludicrous that only someone who truly has zero sense of or no regard for scale whatsoever could come up with it. It works by sucking up an entire star and compressing it to the point where it can fit inside of a small planet for the sole purpose of providing ammunition for the gun, which is intended to destroy one to a few planets per star absorbed. This is like stealing a nuke so you can shrink it into the size of a bullet, stuff it into a Glock and shoot a guy in the head with it. Additionally, going by the effect it has on stars, Starkiller Base's tractor beams alone would be the most powerful weapons ever seen in Star Wars, trivially capable of planet-busting on their own. Instead they shoot an entire star across the galaxy just to blow up a few measly planets. The tech involved in the usage of Starkiller Base should make the First Order GODS. This one space station harnesses energy comparable to a Kardashev Type III civilization. These are people who should be building entire solar systems from scratch, not struggling to blow up a few planets.
• In the Back to the Future films, time travel needs 1.21 gigawatts — the only source of which is supposedly plutonium or a lightning bolt. Large-scale electrical generation power plants can generate several gigawatts or more.^note The Hoover Dam alone puts out over 2 gigawatts and was built in the 1930s. Not all of the generation was online by the 1950s setting of the film, but it was certainly a well-understood technology by then. Not exactly something you can carry around in a DeLorean, or that you could necessarily draw from the local power grid, but also not the impossibility the film makes it out to be. Also, watts are a power unit, not an energy one. It is perfectly feasible - though a bit difficult - to produce gigawatt burst of power by harnessing the energy in some AA cells, if the burst duration need to be just some fraction of a microsecond or less.
• Armageddon (1998): The team splits the purported asteroid in two by setting off a 20 megaton nuclear device in the hole. Now, setting aside the concept of getting a nuke into such a hole (which is fairly narrow in diameter), this is roughly equivalent to taking a bowling ball, pricking its surface gently with a push pin, and then farting into the hole. Imagine drilling into the ground in the middle of Texas, 800 feet down, and blowing up a few nukes - do you think it would blast the entire state apart? A group of scientists actually did the calculation and came up with a number in the range of 800 yottajoules to actually split the asteroid and cause both halves to miss—approximately the amount of energy produced by the Sun every two seconds, or approximately the output of 3.3 billion Tsar Bombas (the biggest bomb ever detonated), or 165 petatons of TNT. And that's assuming it broke relatively cleanly in half: it'd be more likely to just shatter the dwarf planet and shower the Earth with high-velocity grapeshot. This is why theoretical asteroid defense missions just plan to alter the asteroid's course enough to miss: actually destroying an incoming object that's big enough to make a mission worthwhile is Awesome, but Impractical.
• The Terminator: The T-800 asks for a phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range. The phased part is a bit of a mystery, but forty watts of plasma is about half a candle's output, as a very hot fire is the most familiar example of plasma. Hitting your opponent with the output of a lit match might sting a bit, but it doesn't sound terribly lethal. The novelization over-corrects in this regard and makes it 40 megawatts, about the power output of a forest fire. And it's a hand held weapon. seems legit.
• In Forbidden Planet, the Captain is overawed by their fight with the Id Monster, saying that it easily survived being hit by "three billion electron-volts". An electron-volt is the energy a single electron gains by moving through a potential difference of one volt: 160 sextillionths of a joule. Three billion electron volts wouldn't be enough energy to light a match; collision with a flying mosquito would be three hundred times as much energy.
• Total Recall (2012) has an elevator that passes through the Earth's core—never mind that that would basically involve passing through the working part of a fission reactor, not something the car in question really seems equipped to do.
• In Starcrash they claim that an ice planet is "thousands of degrees below zero". While they don't say if they mean Fahrenheit or Celsius, absolute zero, which is by definition the coldest temperature possible, is either –273.15°C or –459.67°F.

Gamebooks

• One book of the Star Challenge collection, Exploding Suns, is quite egregious on this. In this book, we've got a fleet (seemingly of medium size) of ships that bombards a star with "negatron missiles" and "anti-matter charges"^note "Negatron" is an old name for the electron or another name for an antiproton, a particle of antimatter. You can see the mess until it implodes to form a black hole (one has to wonder how many munitions they had and how a star attacked by antimatter and electrons can collapse). But also we've got a humanoid body large, but seemingly not of planetary proportions, said to be made of the energy of a thousand suns. The latter thing has densities comparable to those during the earliest moments of the Big Bang and nothing happens to the planet where's based until one good ending, in which it collapses forming a black hole and absorbing that planet. You, however, are fine in space despite being very close to it

Literature

• Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series is usually very good about keeping distances, masses and velocities in proportion (not too surprising, as Reynolds is an astrophysicist). He does lose track of energy sometimes though. "Redemption Ark" has "crustbuster warheads" with a yield of 1 teraton—that's a million megatons—and mentions that a destabilized Conjoiner drive on a lighthugger releases three orders of magnitude more energy than THAT. Granted, nobody sane ever tries to harm a lighthugger in the vicinity of an inhabited planet but a couple of times in the series, starships do go up. In the Absolution Gap novel, the lighthugger Gnostic Ascension blows up when less than 20,000 km from an icy moon Hela. At the very least the hemisphere of Hela should have melted.
• Riverworld:
  • Food is provided by an energy-to-matter conversion. Three times a day, each Grailstone blasts out enough energy to create food for seven hundred people, and half that energy gets wasted into the air. There are some 20,000,000 Grailstones on the planet. Just for clarity, a one-kiloton thermonuclear explosion converts about .05 grams of mass to energy. The Grailstones should blow the atmosphere off the planet at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Now that's a barbecue!
  • The source of this energy is also a problem: it's stated that the Grail system is powered by thermoelectric generators under the planet's crust. The available energy (3.6 exajoules per day) sounds like a lot, but it's only enough to synthesize about 40kg of food.
• Star Trek Expanded Universe: According to the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual, each photon torpedo on a Galaxy-class starship carries enough antimatter to produce an annihilation reaction equivalent to the most powerful H-bombs ever produced, yet the booms they make when they hit unshielded targets can be surprisingly small. Pretty much any warship that takes a torpedo hit without Deflector Shields should be obliterated. It's even more egregious with quantum torpedoes according to the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Technical Manual, which are supposed to be photon torpedoes on steroids but are sometimes depicted as weaker in terms of the booms they make in the show.
• Star Wars Expanded Universe: An artbook for The Last Jedi depicts Free Virgillia-class corvettes carrying strategic plasma bombs that are the size of buildings, but only have a 100 megaton yield, making them significantly less efficient for their size than real-world nuclear weapons (Tsar Bomba had a 50 megaton yield but was only 8 meters long).
• Star Wars Legends: The Incredible Cross-Sections reference books for the Star Wars prequel trilogy, written by physicist Dr. Curtis Saxton, became quite controversial for giving energy numbers that to some readers appeared to significantly inflated compared to the film special effects: for example, maximum yields of 200 gigatons on the turbolasers of Acclamator-class troop transports (Attack of the Clones) and 10 teratons for Venator-class star destroyers (Revenge of the Sith); for reference, the latter number is about 10% of the estimated yield of the Chicxulub meteorite impact. Saxton has shown where his calculations came from;^note primarily the Death Star's destruction of Alderaan, the concept of Base Delta Zero from West End Games' Imperial Sourcebook, and shots from The Empire Strikes Back of star destroyers blowing up asteroids said to be nickel-iron in Alan Dean Foster's novelization however, other authors such as Gary Sarli have questioned some of his underlying assumptions.^note e.g. whether "Base Delta Zero" involves glassing an entire planet For the Evulz or just destroying population centers as well as whether it was doing so alone or with a backup fleet and how much time would be necessary, and whether General Dodonna's claim that the Death Star "carries a firepower greater than half the starfleet" was referring to its planet-destroying weapon or the amount of gun batteries on its surface. Saxton assumed that a single Star Destroyer could literally melt an entire planet's crust and render it effectively permanently uninhabitable in a matter of minutes, which was about ten orders of magnitude removed from the more conservative interpretation that a fleet of Star Destroyers could destroy all of a planet's major population centers in days or weeks. Due to his author's notes thanking various members of online "versus debating" communities, Saxton was also accused of deliberately inflating his numbers to "win" arguments over whether Star Wars factions would beat Star Trek factions in a war.
• In the Tom Swift/Hardy Boys crossover novel Time Bomb, if an item is sent in time to a space that is already occupied by another object, the objects explode with a matter-to-energy conversion of 100% and a very big explosion. Fair enough, but the author grossly underestimates the magnitude of the explosion. In one example, Tom sends a small pebble back in time into a rock and creates a crater three feet in diameter. However, the explanation given indicates that the overlap of solid objects through time travel mimics a matter-antimatter interaction in real life. Therefore, assuming time travel really did work as described in the book, then sending a single human hair back in time into a solid object would cause an explosion equivalent to 26.66 tons of TNT, to say nothing of sending a pebble into a rock (which would be more like 100 kilotonnes).

Live-Action TV

• In Space: 1999, an explosion at a nuclear waste dump accelerates Earth's moon to a speed that defies the laws of physics. In fact, the energy required to get the moon out of orbit is more than enough to completely pulverize it.
• Star Trek:
  • Every Star Trek with a ship exploding SERIOUSLY underestimates the size of the explosion. Take the Constitution-class. To do what it does, with as much as "20 years" of time between refueling quoted in the original Manual, 10,000 tons of antimatter is not an unreasonable figure to allow the immense, continuous power uses. At ~43 megatons of TNT equivalent for a kilogram of antimatter reacting with the matter, we get 430,000 gigatons of TNT. To put it in perspective, that's about three or four dinosaur killers. But we routinely see ships near other exploding ships being unaffected by the storm of hard radiation.
  • Matter Replicators, introduced in TNG, vary in their depiction Depending on the Writer. An outgrowth of transporter technology, they either rearrange matter at the atomic level, or convert Pure Energy into mass. Given E=mc^2, the latter process would be phenomenally inefficient compared to simply bringing supplies along.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation:
    • "Ménage à Troi": goes extremely far in the other direction. The Enterprise is studying a stellar nursery whose power output is said to be 5.34 x 10^41 watts. This is equivalent to over one quadrillion Suns (roughly the same total output of about 10,000 Milky Ways), or a supernova blast every three minutes. It is so huge that any planet within 500 light-years of the nebula would be roasted by the sheer heat it produces. Oh, and it's also stated that it is a fairly typical example of this phenomenon.
    • "Conundrum": The crew is brainwashed by a Satarran into helping them win a war against the Lysians, whose hardware is "greatly outclassed" by the Enterprise-D. Specifically, the energy output of the Lysian Central Command is given as "4.3 kilojoules". According to its packaging, the energy content of a single piece of After Eight chocolate is 145 kilojoules. The Lysians cannot protect their own starbase from a flashlight. Even better: a Lysian destroyer effortlessly dispatched by the Enterprise earlier in the episode is mentioned as having disruptors worth 2.1 megajoules—500-something times stronger than their starbase's shield output. The Satarrans' hat is brainwashing entire crews. Wasn't there a simpler way for them to win the war than to make an episode of television?
  • The Star Trek: Discovery episode "An Obol for Charon" has a faulty conduit threatening to fry Stamets, Reno, and Tilly with its gigantic energy content of 10 GeV - or roughly the tenth of the kinetic energy of a flying mosquito. Electron-volts are a unit normally used to describe the electromagnetism of subatomic particles.
• In the Secret of Bigfoot episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man, Oscar Goldman has to detonate a 500 megaton atomic bomb that's been buried 500 feet down to trigger a fault and stop a much bigger earthquake that will level the west coast. A 500 megaton bomb is roughly equivalent to a Richter magnitude 9.0 earthquake, such as the one that hit Japan in 2011 - which was about 200 times deeper. The largest nuclear device ever detonated was the Tsar Bomba, at only 50 megatons. It produced a mushroom cloud over 200,000 feet high, or roughly ten times the height of Mount Everest. The heat from the explosion would have been enough to cause third-degree burns 100km away from the epicentre. 500 feet of earth would have had almost literally no effect on a 500MT bomb. The Aliens, who have their base in the vicinity, send The Beautiful Woman of the Week to defuse the device, and Steve Austin has to stop her. Steve overcomes the alien and then runs off with 10 seconds before detonation. It's been established that Steve can run at a top speed of 60 miles an hour, meaning that he could make it a whole 880 feet before detonation. Writer Kenny Johnson addresses the problem with "Yeah, but what are you going to do?"
• The Flash (2014):
  • The energy required to operate the "Speedforce Bazooka" is somewhat under 4 Terajoules, which is a large amount of energy, but nowhere near "More energy than what's in the Sun", as stated in the show. It's roughly the energy of a kiloton explosion, meaning a small backpack nuke. The amount of energy the sun produces in one second is roughly 380 Yottajoules of energy.
  • Cisco says Heatwave's gun reaches absolute hot, which is a million billion billion times hotter then the sun. That much heat would destroy the world every time Heatwave uses it.
• In Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers Lord Zedd's zord Serpentera blows up an entire planet with what looks like a Breath Weapon. While we aren't told how big the planet is, it seems to about the same size as Earth, as gravity is the same. Blowing up the Earth would take about 10^32 joules of energy. Even considering how huge Serpenterra is (about the size of the Empire State Building), it blowing up and entire planet with one "shot" seems a bit much, though at least the thing runs out of power and needs to recharge directly afterward.

Video Games

• The Pokédex entries for some Pokémon species.
  • "Magcargo's body temperature is 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit" (Sun's surface: 5,800 Kelvin, or 9980 F), "Charizard's fire is hot enough to melt boulders" (1200 Celsius, 2192 F)... Neither Pokemon in-game or anywhere have shown this level of power or temperature, Magcargo only gives you a small burn without much consequence besides a quick recoil if you pet it in the 6th generation's Pokemon Amie feature and Charizard's flames will never defeat Rock Pokemon on their own without a boost from Sunny Day, items or stat increasement.
  • Lanturn is said to be able to emit a light bright enough to be visible from the surface even while it's three miles beneath the sea. The amount of energy required to make a light this bright far exceeds what exists in the entire universe. Just try to imagine how bright and hot a lightbulb would have to be for you to see it from three miles away, and then add in that light travels very poorly through water compared to air, and this description quickly falls apart.
• In Metroid Prime: Hunters, the Volt Driver is said to fire multi-terawatt bursts of electricity. A terawatt or one trillion (10^12) watts is the unit that measures the total amount of power used by humanity (about 15 terawatts). The Judicator fires supercooled plasma that reaches near Absolute Zero. Both of these are hand-held weapons. Could be justified if the terawatt output is only sustained for an infinitesimal length of time.
  • On the other side of the scale, the Shock Coil weapon somehow manages to kill things with neutrinos. Neutrinos are famous for having almost zero mass. Trillions of them are passing through your body right now. The description says these neutrinos are "high density" but the sheer amount it would take to do even the smallest bit of damage would be absolutely insane.^note It's been estimated that for the neutrino output of a Supernova to be lethal you'd have to have been inside the star before it exploded.
  • The annihilator beam of Metroid Prime 2: Echoes combines matter and antimatter. This would produce a blast comparable to a nuclear bomb. The beam is semiautomatic (0.5 grams of matter and antimatter produce roughly 9 * 10^13 Joules of energy — which is, roughly, the energy output of a Fat Man type nuclear explosion. 0.0001g of matter and antimatter each would still produce enough energy to melt a metric ton of steel.) Despite this, the Annihilator beam ends up being a Jack of All Stats compared to fighting a Light or Dark Aether enemy with the opposite polarity weapon, being less effective against killing either of them.
• The fusion or antimatter powerplants for the starships in the X-Universe have laughably low power outputs. The net output of a 4-kilometer long destroyer's antimatter reactor is about the same as burning a couple gallons of gasoline. Shields would be incapable of protecting a ship from flecks of dust because of how low their rating would be in reality.
• Deus Ex: Human Revolution gives us the P.E.P.S. energy stunner. With an output of 5.0 x 10^67 J◊. The estimated total energy of the observable universe is approximately 4.0 × 10^69 J. Ayup, the stun gun that can't knock over a boss and can be fired multiple times in quick succession releases about 1.25% of all the energy in the entire universe. Most likely it's a typo and they mean 5.0 x 10^6 J, which is about equal to a kilogram of TNT.
• In League of Legends Cho'gath's Feral Scream ability is released by "451 Exawatt Omnisonic Speakers" in his Battlecast Prime skin. That is about 2600 times the power Earth receives from the sun and translates to 326 decibels. For reference, the threshold of pain starts at 140 decibels, glass shatters at 163 dB, eardrums start rupturing at 190 dB, and the threshold of death ends at 200 dB. Decibels also operate on a logarithmic scale, meaning that adding 10 decibels actually multiplies the energy output tenfold, making it more than a trillion times louder than the aforementioned threshold of death. In 1 second, this Feral Scream releases more energy than 2000 Tsar Bombas, the more powerful nuclear device in history, or 100 gigatons of TNT.
• Star Ocean 3 has it's big Reveal that the Abusive Precursors responsible for creating the universe are a bunch of programs and programmers because the universe is a giant video game. A fairly controversial twist on its own, but it may have been easier to accept if we didn't get to see four-dimensional space for ourselves. Not only is nothing else in their world anywhere close to the energy or Technology Levels required to simulate an entire universe, they appear to be only slightly more advanced than the rest of the Star Ocean world^note somewhere around Kardashev Type 2; Faster-Than-Light Travel is common but takes weeks, and planet destroying weapons are mostly theoretical which we earlier see only has fairly basic virtual reality.

Western Animation

• Ben 10:
  • The self destruct mechanism on the Omnitrix releases enough energy to destroy the entire universe. One of many problems with that idea is if you ever got that much energy into one point (assuming it existed in the first place), the total absence of energy from the rest of the universe would destroy it anyway.
  • Also in the episode "Ben Versus the Negative Ten", the artifact the villains are trying to steal is described by Grandpa Max as containing "The power of a thousand suns... enough to blow a continent off the face of the Earth!" ^note Which is a true statement, if slightly misleading, as that sort of power could easily blow the face of the Earth off the face of the Earth many, many times over.
• The Superfriends frequently have their heroes performing feats that even the pre-Crisis Silver Age comic authors would have blanched at:
  • In one World's Greatest Superfriends episode, a giant Space Viking several times the size of Jupiter steals the Earth puts it in his belt pouch, and stomps away (!) through interplanetary space. While Apache Chief distracts the villain by growing to his size and wrestling with him (!!), Superman sneaks into his belt pouch, recovers the Earth, and then pushes the Earth back into its proper orbit in the space of a few seconds (!!!). Ignoring the fact that pushing on the Earth that hard would turn it inside-out, this operation would require many times more energy than Superman can possibly store within his own body, even if he were powered by antimatter.
  • In the Challenge episode "Invasion of the Fearians", Green Lantern is sent out to divert some meteors that are on a collision course with Earth. Unfortunately, the meteors are yellow, so his power ring won't affect them. What does he do? He moves the Earth out of the way. And neglects to put it back.
• The '90s version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had in one episode the attempt of villains Shredder and Krang of depleting the sun to power the Technodrome, it gets worse if you consider that in another episode they had tried to steal the power of a nuclear submarine for the same purpose. Go figure. They've also gotten to partial operation with a stationary bike generator.
• In the Supermarionation series Fireball XL5, it only took a few missiles to blow up an incoming planet.
• In an episode of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, a clone mentions that the enemy is capable of firing missiles that carry a "100 megaton yield." That sort of power would be about 5,000 times stronger than the Fat Man atomic bomb dropped during WWII and equal to the theoretical maximum yield of the largest nuclear weapon ever made. Shortly after, we see three large missiles fire and produce fireballs roughly in line with your bog-standard Hollywood explosion. While technically these missiles were never identified as the 100-MT yield ones, why bother mentioning what the yields are for their biggest missiles if all they're going to do is fire the weaksauce ones?